Curtin reaches out to break Chinese gridlock

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Professor Ashley Lloyd says the Curtin project is "an
early attempt" to show the
value of
distributed
interactions.
Photo: Tony
Ashby

A tri-continental computing grid linking one of Europe's largest
supercomputers with those at the Curtin University Business School
in Western Australia and Beijing's Chinese Academy of Sciences is a
step towards establishing Australia as an important information
services provider to China.

The country's rapid economic growth is straining the ability of
its companies to meet consumer demand, a problem shared by many
businesses around the world, requiring ever-greater computer
resources to analyse massive volumes of customer data.

It is this demand that Curtin Professor Ashley Lloyd hopes to
meet. He says that if the grid computing project lives up to its
promise, Australia could establish a reputation as a supplier of
resources and knowledge for grid computing, using networks of
computers and devices to perform intensive tasks.

"This is an early attempt to show that high-performance
interactions can be distributed," Professor Lloyd says.

The grid is anchored by nodes in Perth, Beijing and Edinburgh.
With more than 2 billion people living between the Perth and
Beijing nodes, scientists hope to access the computer cycles needed
to analyse very large data sets.

Professor Lloyd says computer cycle supply is something far more
easily scaled to meet demand than primary resources such as iron
ore and petrochemicals, which Australia already sells to China to
fuel its economic growth.

Australian researchers will get insights into the high security
needs of grids to make the transition from the lab into the
commercial world. And the project will develop Australia's skills,
tools and techniques, he says. Partly funded by the British
Economic and Social Research Council, the project is part of
Curtin's e-social science program, which provides a grid platform
for Australia's participation in international e-science tasks.

Professor Lloyd says large- scale science will increasingly be
carried out through distributed global collaborations with access
to very big data collections and fast computers.

For global corporations, this is a mammoth task and explains why
grids are so attractive because computer cycles are bought as
easily as switching on a light bulb.

"When a company has a large amount of data the scale of
the analysis needed exceeds the capability," he says. "This will
demonstrate the ability to take cycles from anywhere and make that
available to other countries."

Claimed to be the first time such a project has been attempted,
the three-continent grid builds on a two-year-old link between
Curtin and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre in Britain.
Professor Lloyd was based at Edinburgh University before accepting
the Curtin chair in 2002. This connection to the Beijing academy,
home to one of China's largest computers, which hosts the .cn
top-level internet country domain, extends Curtin's grid computing
project.

The project will also help China compete internationally,
Professor Lloyd says.

"Closer socioeconomic ties will depend on co-operative
development of grid protocols and their compatibility with
established and developing business processes within the three
regions," he says.

One of the keys to Curtin's success is the support of businesses
that provide real data sets to be used for e-social science
research projects. Professor Lloyd says that by extending the grid
into China, companies can analyse customer behaviour in emerging
markets with billions of potential consumers. Although he won't
specify the commercial applications, Professor Lloyd says data
could predict consumer behaviour.

The Curtin grid has Sun Sparc systems in Beijing and Perth and
supercomputers in Edinburgh. The fast network is provided by
AARNet3, the academic research network being deployed throughout
Australia with links to academic networks worldwide.

Perth and Beijing being in the same time zone helps load
balancing of the grid and also reduces time delay in communications
in the network.